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Spring football ... in Detroit? 2 groups think so

Photo by COURTESY OF RIVALS PROFESSIONAL LEAGUE
Quentin Hines (center), owner of the Rivals Professional Football League, with the head coaches of the four teams: Wendell Jefferson of the Detroit Cougars, Robert Hunt of the Southern Michigan Mustangs, Matt Griebel of the Chicago Kings and Gary Hutt of the Akron Blaze.

Passes at pro football league alternatives

Here are some examples of attempted spring professional football leagues or alternatives to the National Football League:

• United States Football League: The 18-team league played a spring schedule in 1983-85, and the Michigan Panthers won the championship in the first season. It had national TV deals with ESPN and ABC, and rosters of former and future NFL stars. Owners began spending beyond the salary cap to remain competitive. A push by New Jersey Generals owner Donald Trump for a fall schedule is usually blamed for the league's demise, but the USFL's poor TV rating in the spring of 1985 indicated it was in trouble. Combined USFL team debt in 1985 reached $140 million.

• World League of American Football: The NFL launched this developmental league, later NFL Europe and then NFL Europa, that ran domestically and overseas from 1991 to 2007.

• XFL: This eight-team league with gimmicky rules played February through April 2001 as a 50-50 partnership between pro wrestling impresario Vince McMahon and NBC Sports. Teams, all owned by the league, played 10 games. Although well-capitalized, it lasted one season and reportedly suffered a $35 million loss. Strong TV ratings the first week plunged under intense media and fan criticism, although attendance averaged a respectable 23,500 a game. The average player salary was $45,000.

• Arena Football League: This league, launched in 1987, saw the Mike Ilitch-owned Detroit Drive win four championships from 1988 through 1992 before going out of business in 2009. The league included NFL team owners, former NFL players and rock star Jon Bon Jovi among its investors. After the league's minor-league affiliate, af2, bought the assets of its parent, the AFL returned in 2010 with a vastly smaller payroll structure and a new broadcast deal with the NFL Network. It has 14 teams today.

• Continental Indoor Football League: This minor league has had a number of Michigan teams since it was founded as the Great Lakes Indoor Football League in 2006. Teams in Detroit, Battle Creek, Saginaw, Muskegon, Kalamazoo, Flint and Port Huron all failed, moved or switched leagues. It has 10 teams now, including Taylor, Port Huron and Saginaw.

• Stars Football League LLC: Stars has four teams in Florida, has been in operation since 2011 and is the brainchild of former player agent-turned-real estate investor Peter Huthwaite of Grosse Pointe. Its players are paid a few hundred dollars a game, and teams rely on tickets, concessions and sponsorships for most revenue. The league buys airtime on local radio stations and sells shares in the single-entity league.

• All American Football League: The six-team league was to have had a team at Ford Field and spent $30 million on startup costs, only to call it quits in March 2008 because the subprime-mortgage crisis evaporated the funding of league founder Marcus Katz. The AAFL's schtick was drafting only players with a college degree. But despite a connection to major sports names, it never played a game. Ford Field attempted via lawsuit to enforce a $1 million contract with the league.

• Spring Football League Inc.: This lasted two of a scheduled four-game test season in April-May 2000 despite the involvement of former NFL stars such as Eric Dickerson, Drew Pearson, Bo Jackson and Tony Dorsett. Teams were in Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and San Antonio.

• International Football Federation: Singer Dionne Warwick was part of the group that announced the federation in 1999. Detroit was among the 13 teams, but the IFF never got beyond the proposal stage. The February-July league, which couldn't secure a television deal, was proposed by Dennis Murphy, a co-founder of the American Basketball Association in the 1960s and the World Hockey Association in the 1970s.

• Spring Professional Football League: The 10-team league included several future NFL players and former Detroit Lions head coach Darryl Rogers running a team in Arkansas. It got as far as holding training camps in 1992 before folding. The league was a single-entity structure with a $250,000 ownership buy-in fee and a $2 million-per-team payroll. It had no TV deal.

• World Football League: The WFL was a summer-fall effort in 1974 that ended during the 1975 season. It had 13 teams playing a 20-game schedule and included some NFL players and owners who paid a $120,000 franchise fee. Among the teams were the Detroit Wheels, who played at Ypsilanti's Rynearson Stadium and were co-owned by Marvin Gaye and Mike Ilitch, among others. The team was a financial disaster and folded with six games left in 1974. The league had a broadcast syndication deal with TVS Television Network.

• United Football League: The four-team UFL, using former NFL players and coaches, was founded by an investment banker in 2007. Play lasted from 2009 until folding under financial duress four games into the 2012 season. It played in the fall in non-NFL cities. The league bought airtime with CBS Sports Network, HDNet and Versus.

Two groups — one a small local effort led by the grandson of Detroit Tigers great Willie Horton, and the other a California-based endeavor with national aspirations — this year are launching spring professional football leagues that include Detroit as a market.

Both ventures say they have the formula for success where so many other leagues have failed, as does a third national spring football project that is avoiding Detroit and other current pro football markets.

Trying to buck the trend are the Livermore, Calif-based A11 Professional Football League and the Clinton Township-based Rivals Professional Football League (led by Horton's grandson Quentin Hines) — both of which have Michigan teams. Not coming to Detroit is the "new" United States Football League led by former longtime National Football League executive Jim Bailey.

Hail Mary?

Such spring football attempts are nothing new: The spectacular $140 million flameout of the first iteration of the USFL in the 1980s hasn't stopped entrepreneurs from investing in subsequent spring pro football leagues, with Detroit often among targeted markets.

The history of spring pro football is a graveyard of failed attempts over the past 40 years, but the economic theory behind every spring league effort is the same: American thirst for football is year-round, and there's money to be made by fielding teams in April through June before the $12 billion NFL and college football dominate the rest of the year.

What has doomed spring efforts has been the lack of national television broadcast rights contracts, which provide billions of dollars for the NFL and NCAA; the lack of lucrative corporate sponsorships; and overspending by undercapitalized owners, sports industry analysts say.

"Devising a business strategy that truly works over time, including how best to break through the clutter and garner meaningful dollars from corporate America, and the media continues to be key fundamental challenges for upstart leagues," said David Carter, executive director of the University of Southern California's Sports Business Institute.

All of the proposed spring leagues use variations of the same primary cost-control business strategy to try to succeed where other efforts have failed. The model: League ownership of the teams rather than individually owned franchises, known as a single-entity league. (This model is used by Major League Soccer, but not the other four major U.S. pro sports leagues.)

A single-entity league allows management to (theoretically) control player costs, the source of fatal overspending in past leagues.

Last month, the A11 Professional Football League announced that the seventh of its eight teams will be the Michigan Panthers — using the name, logo and colors of the USFL team owned by Detroit billionaire Al Taubman.

"We've been close observers of what's occurred before. The problems are correctable," said Michael Keller, the A11FL's president and COO. He was director of football operations for the original Panthers when they played at the Pontiac Silverdome and won the inaugural USFL championship in 1983.

"These leagues have failed because of circumstances that could have been eliminated early," Keller said. "This country loves football, and it's wide open in the spring."

The A11FL estimates that it needs $50 million in startup capital to operate for three years, at which point it forecasts that the league will be solvent, Keller said.

It's charging $5 million for the rights to a team market, said Keller, who played at the University of Michigan and in the NFL to start a career that's seen him work for several pro football leagues.

The league has said it wants to be in certain former USFL markets to capitalize on the nostalgic popularity of those former teams.

The A11FL, which got a flurry of media coverage earlier this year for offering a quarterbacking job to former NFL player Tim Tebow, said Ford Field or the Silverdome are possible homes for the Panthers when the league launches its full schedule in 2015.

The NFL's Detroit Lions confirmed that Keller approached them in March 2013 about the possibility of leasing Ford Field, but no deal was signed.

The A11FL's on-field gimmick is allowing any player on the field to wear an eligible uniform number at any position, allowing for different formations on the field than seen in the NFL or college football.

The league has a deal with ESPN2 to air exhibition games on May 17 from Raymond James Stadium in Tampa and June 5 from the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.

The full league is scheduled to launch in 2015, and ESPN2 will air two games a week, Keller said. The deal is a barter agreement in which the network gives the league some of the advertising inventory to sell instead of paying it cash.

Keller said the deal is immediately profitable for the league, and is the only way a nationwide football league can survive.

"The business plan just doesn't work unless you have a huge TV deal," he said. "We're looking at major markets because the TV people want the major numbers."

Other markets include San Francisco, Dallas and Chicago. In addition to Michigan, the A11FL has revived three other USFL team names and markets: the Los Angeles Express, New Jersey Generals and Tampa Bay Bandits. An eighth team, for the 2015 season, has yet to be announced.

The A11FL has hired a third-party firm to sell corporate sponsorships to the major national brands in such segments as soft drink, beer, hotels and apparel, Keller said. He declined to disclose details on the sponsorships.

Smaller efforts

The more modest locally based effort organizing now is the Rivals League, owned and run by CEO Hines, who was briefly with the NFL's New England Patriots and is the grandson of Horton, one of the more famous members of the 1968 Tigers team that won the World Series.

Hines' development league has four teams in Michigan, Ohio and Illinois scheduled to begin play in April.

The two local teams — the Detroit Cougars and Southern Michigan Mustangs — will play games at Mt. Clemens High School and Gibraltar Carlson High School, he said.

Hines said he and several NFL friends pooled money to start the league, and they have almost the entire $400,000 they need to operate the RPFL its first year.

Developmental leagues rely on money players pay to try out for teams, and they'll be paid a base salary of anywhere from $100 to $350 a game plus incentives, Hines said. Other revenue comes from tickets and merchandise sales.

"Our cost is low. We're not like these other leagues," he said. "We're not trying to compete with any of those leagues. I want to give guys an opportunity to continue playing football when the door closed for them."

The 'new' USFL

The other major national effort at a spring league is the "new" USFL led by former NFL executive Bailey. His San Diego-based league has the rights to the USFL name, but not the old teams, which belong to A11FL.

Unlike the other leagues, the new USFL hasn't announced its markets, team names, schedule or investors yet. The intention is to have enough operating capital in the bank to operate for a couple of seasons first, Bailey said.

"We have a fairly sophisticated capitalization plan that we're at work on the first phase of right now," he said, without disclosing details other than that he's seeking individual and corporate investment in two phases before a 2015 kickoff.

"We're working hard to structure a financial package that minimizes the risk to the investors and allocates the rewards," he said, adding that he expects the league to lose money for a few years until it has the leverage to negotiate TV deals that will make it profitable.

Bailey said he's analyzed why all the other leagues have failed.

"I've studied those really hard. The common feature is undercapitalization. They tried to start playing before they were capitalized and got deeper in the hole," he said. "We're not going to implement anything until we're real — money in the bank to sustain us," he said.

His other strategy is having the USFL operate as a single-entity league, with owners buying shares that allow them to operate a team. That prevents owners from overspending in a competitive race, he said, which is what doomed major efforts such as the USFL and the World Football League in 1974-75.

"That leads down a bad path," he said.

The USFL will target cities that have no NFL or Major League Baseball team, reducing competition for discretionary fan dollars. So no Detroit for the USFL, which Bailey said will be a minor-league developmental league.

The new USFL also was dealt a setback when its founder, Jaime Cuadra, pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $1 million and tax fraud in June 2013. Cuadra resigned from the USFL, and Bailey and other league executives re-formed the business as a new entity with no ties to him.

Investor blitz

Why do investors keep trying to find a model that works with spring leagues? Analysts say they can't resist.

"America loves football, so (investors) are willing to try it and pour money into it. When they find out after they spend the money is it's very difficult to create a structure of what is even a shadow of what the NFL is," said Marc Ganis, president of Chicago-based sports consulting firm Sportscorp Ltd.

"It is an enormously difficult business to put together logistically. You can do it on a small scale. To try to do it on national scale, where you have to draw fan interest, it just doesn't happen. It's is not practically feasible."

Exacerbating problems for startup leagues are player health concerns and organized labor issues, he said.

Still, under a very narrow set of circumstances, with the right timing and skill, a spring league could work, Ganis said.

"There is a gap in the calendar where there could be something put together, but I think it has to be done by the NFL. It's just so difficult and so expensive," he said.